Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder (26 page)

There were many tears that night. In the kitchen, Maureen showed Carol photos of Belinda in the collection covering the refrigerator, and Carol broke down when Becky Temple, Kevin’s wife, sobbed while recounting how she’d gone to Old Navy to buy Belinda a new skirt and top to be buried in. She’d also brought a soft blanket for Erin.

Yet what the Lucases would remember most, perhaps, was David’s attorney. One of David’s uncles announced that Looney had something to say and he stood in the living room, center stage, addressing the group. “We believe that in the next few days, David is going to be arrested,” he said. “You all need to support him.”

The detectives, the attorney charged, were unfairly targeting David, and Looney described the treatment of David and his parents at Clay Road the night of the murder as disgraceful and uncalled for. Then he announced that investigators were trying to get a judge to sign a warrant that would allow them to interrogate Evan, asking the young toddler painful questions about his mother’s death. As Looney described it, the investigation sounded out of control. Looking at the Lucas family, especially Belinda’s parents, Looney said, “I want you to go to the courthouse and tell the district attorney’s office that you don’t want Evan interviewed. Tell them you won’t stand for it.”

Acting as if police had indeed mistreated them, Maureen and Ken sobbed. But David merely sat back and stared at his hands. Throughout the evening, he’d shunned making eye contact with any of Belinda’s family, and Jill looked at him and thought that perhaps Looney didn’t want Evan to talk to prosecutors because there was the possibility the boy had overheard or seen something. “I thought the writing was on the wall,” says Jill. “Brian was right and David had murdered Belinda, and the police knew it.”

“When was the last time you went hunting?” Looney asked David in front of both families.

“More than a year ago,” he answered, looking across the room at Brenda.

Her family looked at her, too, wondering. Brenda had told them all about New Year’s Eve, just two weeks earlier, when David left the house saying he was spending the weekend hunting with friends. Brenda wondered why David was lying.

“There are things being said about David being involved in the murder,” Looney said. “It’s all hearsay. David may be arrested tomorrow after the funeral, but he didn’t do it.”

Later, in a more private conversation, Looney talked to Carol and Tom, telling them that he feared investigators might have tainted the evidence to frame David. “He said the police officers could have kicked the glass to make it look like the back door was open when the glass broke,” says Tom.

As the evening went on, David’s father circulated through the Lucas family repeating what he’d told others at the wake, that David didn’t own a shotgun. The one he’d had, Ken said, had blown up in his son’s hands years earlier, and he’d never owned one again. To Brian he described that last afternoon, when Belinda picked up soup at the house. “She thought that might be the night she’d have little Erin,” Ken said, over and over. “It might be the night she had the baby.”

As the others talked, David pulled Brenda to his parents’ bedroom, segregating her from the family. “I didn’t go hunting on New Year’s,” he confessed. “I was at a party. I got really drunk, and I kissed a girl.”

Her chest aching with the sadness of her sister’s death, Brenda didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.

“I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Belinda,” David insisted. “You know that.”

“Who was the girl?” Brenda asked, thinking of Belinda’s sadness as David walked out the door that day, leaving her alone with their daughter’s birth approaching.

“Nobody you know,” he said. “I know it was wrong, but I’d never hurt Belinda.”

When she arrived, Brenda didn’t think anything could have made the evening any more painful. She’d already lost her sister and her baby niece, but David’s confession made the horror of Belinda’s death cut even deeper.

As she turned to leave, Brenda heard David say, “I hope you don’t hate me.”

At 9:25 that evening, the third day of the investigation, Chuck Leithner, Mark Schmidt, and Dean Holtke drove to the Temple house on Katy Hockley Road. The investigators rang the bell, and David’s brothers answered. Leithner handed Darren a court order signed by a judge. They were to bring Evan to the office of a psychiatrist, Dr. Bruce Perry, the following Saturday morning, to be interviewed.

“This poor boy just lost his mother and the funeral is tomorrow,” Darren said, shaking his head. But he took the paperwork and closed the door.

Not ready to call it a night, Schmidt decided to complete one more task, to measure the distance from David’s parents’ house to the house on Round Valley. The drive took sixteen minutes. In his statement, David said Belinda called him at 3:30, saying she was on her way home. Cell phone records that had come in showed the call was actually at 3:32. It seemed probable that Belinda had arrived home, as David said in his statement, around 3:45. Schmidt recorded the information, making a note to add it to the timeline of events from January 11 investigators were constructing at the Lockwood office.

A
t Hastings Ninth Grade Center on Friday, an unknown student posted a sign near the gym that read: “Killer Coach!” Meanwhile, twenty miles away at Katy High, students erected a hand-drawn sign of their mascot, the tiger, with a tear in its eye. Underneath it someone wrote, “The Day the Tiger Cried.” In the corridor where Belinda always stood urging students along to their classes, one student remarked to another that the hallways seemed empty without her. At 11:30 that morning, Katy High closed early to allow students and staff to attend Belinda and Erin’s funeral.

Before the service started, Brenda met Detective Tracy Shipley at Tom’s sister’s house. As the detective listened, Brenda told a different story from the one Tom and Carol had just two days earlier. Her account of the time she’d spent with Belinda and David over the holidays didn’t make them sound like a happily married couple. Instead, Brenda repeated her sister’s words to David, “You don’t want this baby girl.”

Belinda’s twin talked of David’s frequent absences, her sister’s sadness and the troubles in her marriage. Then she told of New Year’s Eve, when David left Belinda home and said he was going hunting with friends for two days, not even leaving the names of those he was with and phone numbers. “I don’t know if David murdered Belinda,” Brenda said, “but I knew that they weren’t getting along. He wasn’t home much, and he didn’t want the baby. Something was going on.”

She then told the detective about David’s confession the night before after the visitation, when he pulled Brenda into his parents’ bedroom and admitted that he’d been at a party, not hunting, over the holiday, and that he’d kissed another woman.

When hunting came up, Shipley asked Brenda if she’d ever seen David with a shotgun. That was the one bit of evidence it seemed they were all hoping for, someone who could put a .12-gauge shotgun in David Temple’s hands.

“No,” she said. “I never saw him with the gear. I assumed he had it out in the truck.”

While they talked, Tom walked in, and the detective knew immediately he was fuming. He’d spent the morning thinking about what Paul Looney had said the night before, that the detectives were planning to question his grandson. “I don’t approve of you doing this. I hope you don’t scare that boy,” Tom said. “You better not hurt him.”

Shipley explained that a psychiatrist who specialized in pediatric trauma would conduct the interview, but Tom still appeared angry. After she finished talking to Brenda, Shipley sought Tom out again, explaining further that no one from the sheriff’s department would even be in the interview room, only the psychologist David’s lawyer had hired and the psychiatrist the D.A.’s office had arranged.

“Where did you hear that the sheriff’s department was going to interview your grandson?” Shipley asked.

“From Mr. Looney,” Tom said. “He told us that two or three detectives would take Evan in a room and question him about the day of Belinda’s murder. He said that you’re going to make Evan tell you that his father murdered his mother.”

“That’s not happening,” Shipley tried to reassure him.

As he had the day before, Tom then told the detective, “I want to hang the man who did this to Belinda. But I want to be sure we’ve got the right guy and not convict David because of a dog.”

As Tracy listened, Tom Lucas then said that Paul Looney had told him that deputies might have tampered with evidence, to make it appear that David was guilty.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Mr. Looney said your men could have kicked the glass around from the back door,” Tom told her. “To make it look like the door was open when it was actually closed.”

“That’s not true,” Tracy Shipley insisted.

The pallbearers were coaches, friends of David’s, and they made an impressive sight, large, strong, athletic men, there to accompany the coffin of the young mother and her baby. Quinton was among them, physically standing beside Belinda’s coffin, and still, despite all he knew about David, figuratively standing beside him as his friend. He couldn’t convince himself that David Temple was capable of murdering Belinda.

All First Baptist’s 1,200 seats were filled, and the Temples—except for Evan, who stayed at his grandparents’ with a babysitter—were in their places in the front row when the Lucas family arrived. Tom, Carol and all their children were crying. Tom looked over at the Temples and saw few tears. Carol had such a hard time even walking that Tom had to put his arm around her and help her. When she looked over and saw David, calm, staring down at his hands, she thought:
He’s not even shedding a tear for his wife and baby.
Even then, she never considered the possibility that David could be Belinda’s killer.

The handout given by the ushers at the entry included Belinda’s school photo and began: “In Loving Memory.” Inside was a quote from the Bible: “Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father.”

The Baptist church in Katy, a sprawling building with an entrance under a brick steeple, overflowed. Many who came were from Alief Hastings and Katy High. Debbie and Cindy had made buttons for the faculty and students with Belinda’s picture, and they watched David, thinking about Belinda’s great sadness the last year of her life, her fear that her marriage was over. The two women were glad that as he looked out at the crowd that had gathered to grieve over Belinda, everywhere he looked he’d see the buttons with her face.

At school, Debbie had begun compiling memories in a book for Evan, one they’d keep until he was old enough to appreciate it. Students and other teachers had written notes, to tell the toddler what they knew about Belinda, things she wouldn’t be around for him to learn firsthand. Even the students tried to comfort him, reassuring Evan that Belinda was in a better place, writing: “Your mommy was special” “She was a wonderful teacher” “She cared about us” “You, Evan, were her favorite” “She bragged to everyone about you” “Evan, you were the highlight of each day for your mom.”

Students wrote poems pondering the questions so many asked: “Why was she taken from us?” “Was it a selfish creep looking for money or was it God’s will?”

In a poem one student titled “A Gathering of Angels,” the author assured Evan that if he listened closely, he might hear his mother’s voice.

“It’s okay to cry,” one teenager advised, while another said, “Your mother touched all our lives. She was a teacher everyone wanted.”

At the funeral service, Don Clayton, David’s high-school football coach who’d helped him and Belinda find their teaching jobs, gave a eulogy. He’d say later that it was one of the hardest things he’d ever have to do. The choir sang hymns, including “Be Strong and Take Courage,” and the Klein High School band played.

When he addressed the gathering, the pastor’s eulogy talked of Belinda’s love of her husband and son. “This virtuous young woman has touched so many hearts,” he said. While the rest of the Temple family cried, appearing devastated, David seemed untouched by the sorrow all around him.

For the service, Brenda had written a letter entitled “My Twin.” It talked of their special bond, and of Belinda, not only her sister but also her best friend, their years as girls playing sports and raising chickens for FFA, how beautiful Belinda looked on her wedding day, and that having been with her to share their birthday two weeks earlier was “the best gift I could ever ask for.”

“You will always be with me,” Brenda wrote. “I love you so much and our bond will always exist…. Love you, Sis. Brenda (Shrimpie).”

On the back of the handout was a testament from Ken Temple, entitled Fondly Remembering Belinda. “Today Belinda and Erin are side-by-side in the loving arms of Jesus…. We will no longer look upon [Belinda’s] face, but we will see her and feel her every time we look into the sparkling eyes of her beloved son, Evan Brett Temple.”

At the back of the church throughout the funeral sat Tracy Shipley, and outside, deputies watched from their squad cars. They followed the procession of mourners the short distance to Katy Magnolia Cemetery. Its flat, grassed grounds dotted with trees, statues of praying angels and austere crosses, the cemetery held graves dating back to the early 1900s. Four rows back, a grave from 1911 bore the plaintive verse: “While the body slumbers here, the soul is safe in heaven.” In summer, birds sang and dragonflies buzzed about the headstones. On this January day, the grass was burned out from the winter cold, and Belinda and Erin’s casket rested on braces over the gaping hole of the open grave.

At the gravesite, Tracy watched David and thought he looked like he was trying to “squeeze a tear.” Debbie, Tammey, Brian and Jill, Brenda and others saw something else. As they waited for the pastor to begin speaking, David whispered something to one of his brothers and laughed, ever so slightly. Rather than overcome with emotion, it appeared that David was repeating something he found funny.

As family and friends crushed about him, the pastor said, “I am remiss in not mentioning that there are two deaths here. We’ve also lost baby Erin.”